The developments described in this section are known to the inventors. However, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the developments described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section, or that those developments are known to a person of ordinary skill in the art.
Many modem workplaces are increasingly encouraging employee collaboration. Such collaboration relies on effective communication among co-workers. Various tools are available to assist with collaboration efforts, such as collaboration platforms that facilitate instant messaging (IM) between users, either as a complement to email or as its replacement. Instant messaging applications are also used by groups of people to enable communication for social purposes.
In order to increase functionality of collaboration platforms can be integrated with other systems or services by the use of integrations (also referred to as plug-ins or add-ons). For example, some collaboration platforms let users to subscribe to various third party applications or create their own proprietary applications to add into their groups.
As the number of integrations supported by a collaboration platform increases, so too does the complexity of ensuring all clients are synchronized. As the collaboration system is used, content providers will provide new integrations that can be installed on clients, update existing integrations, and delete previously provided integrations. End-users of the collaboration system can create rooms (e.g. chat groups), change the memberships of those rooms, add integrations to a given room, and remove integrations from a given room. Tracking which clients have which versions of which installations installed, and ensuring this is kept up to date (synchronized) as room membership changes and as integrations are updated by content providers, deleted by content providers, added to rooms, and removed from rooms is challenging.